Austin’s academic career was doing well enough when the Second World War began. He was a young don with a reputation for fair-mindedness and industry, a reputation that got him a commission in the Intelligence Corps. In 1942, he took over a small team gathering intelligence to prepare for an invasion of continental Europe. The work suited Austin’s patient, methodical intelligence. Small pieces of information from a disparate range of sources had to be put together, adding up gradually to a full picture of what an invading Allied force would be up against: French coastal defences, topography, supply lines, road networks and Axis troop movements.
To a different mind, the level of detail would have proved overwhelming. Austin found it exhilarating. An anonymous colleague would later tell his literary executor that Austin, more than any other single person, ‘was responsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day intelligence’. The product of the efforts of Austin and his team was a little handbook – a vade mecum – for the use of troops, drolly titled Invade Mecum. As the literary critic Christopher Ricks wrote in an appreciation of Austin’s prose, he ‘knew that this was no time for not joking’.